If Prisoners Ran Prisons
themarshallproject.org
themarshallproject.org
Young kids who have done something incredibly stupid usually end up in these places. They are then immediately put in a situation to fuck or fight. This behavior will often escalate to extreme violence or to be broken psychologically, then owned by other inmates, bought and sold like property. Can that kind of behavior be unlearned? I doubt it... I would argue that at best, people can only learn to do something better, but always lurking in the background.
This is only one of many of the bizarre insanities of prison life. I personally don't disagree with the idea of punishment or prison. I would however say that prisons are extremely dysfunctional.
Of course there are other issues at play too. For instance, a prison can't be too nice, lest it turns into a free vocational school and people will find committing crimes and getting caught to be an excellent way to get education. Or another example - you can't really make prisoners do useful work for the society (as opposed to just rotting in their cells), because it disrupts the market economy and becomes a powerful force for administrators to threaten their local communities ("do X, or else I unleash my 300+ strong force of unpaid workers and drive you out of market").
The more I think about prisons, the more I see it's a very convoluted issue, and there isn't any obvious, simple solution.
If this turns out to be a serious problem then perhaps your society has other issues it should be dealing with?
'Nice' prisons certainly seem to work pretty well in Norway: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/feb/25/norwegian-pr...
Of course! Which makes the whole thing even more difficult, because now instead of dealing with issues in isolation, you have to untangle the complex web of interdependencies.
Something is wrong when people are finding the idea of an institution meant to punish people a better life than living in our "free" society that people keep insisting is the best country in the history of the world.
Both are Scandinavian counties with a lot of shared history and are both commonly regarded as 'monocultures' yet they have noticeably different social problems. It seems plausible that some of the differences could be traced to different government policies.
And, anyway, no one believes that you can just transplant policies, but even when you cannot just copy you can still learn.
Lastly, we don't end up being fine whatever we do; the stability of Norwegian society has a lot to do with the state of mind that led to the establishment of the oil fund that ensures that the money from the oil is not squandered (like it was in the UK). The general population is broadly supportive of this and the ideas of self reliance, individual and collective responsibility, and assistance for those in need permeate the culture here. No I don't believe it is perfect here, we still have a long way to go, and we must stay vigilant to ensure that the good that we have is preserved and the bad continually rooted out.
That particular problem seems technically easy to solve (politically is another matter, of course). Just let people volunteer to go to prison without actually committing a crime, and make sure they are informed of other options at that interview. We could use the rate at which people do this as a measure of other poverty assistance efforts, and the reasons for doing it to design new efforts.
> Or another example - you can't really make prisoners do useful work for the society (as opposed to just rotting in their cells), because it disrupts the market economy and becomes a powerful force for administrators to threaten their local communities ("do X, or else I unleash my 300+ strong force of unpaid workers and drive you out of market").
You can if you can arrange for the prisoners to be paid at market rate for such things -- though I not only admit, but want to emphasize that this is easier said than done.
"need for justice" makes it looks like it's a normal and even healthy thing.
Many people outside of the US are horrified at the thought families of murder victims going to watch the execution of the perpetrator.
Desire to see the perpetrator suffer is called revenge and is seen by many as a psychological problem in the victims that need therapy and healing.
We don't have to go into the extremes either way.
Also, the desire for punishment is is not about seeing the perpetrator suffer, but about paying for the damage they've done. If someone bumps your car, would you describe the desire for the guilty party to pay for the damages to be a mental illness?
Because heaven forbid we provide free education, vocational or otherwise. /s
EDIT: Sorry, that was snarky. But i agree with a sibling post that apparently Norway is doing alright with their approach. I'd rather see someone going to prison as a failing of society, and consider the cost of incarceration one that society should bear as a result, with the hope of re-integrating the person.
But i do understand your sentiment, i agree with the incentive misalignment.
Rarely any job skills to speak of.
Often very little in the way of education or resources to improve.
So the end result 80-90% of the time is to resort to the familiar crowd and routine.
^ Crimes don't do anything, of course. It's the people in charge who decide who goes to prison.
Hey, if it worked for the Americas and Australia.
Therefore falsifying the premise to the entire argument GP was replying to.
That's a pretty simplistic way to look at it. Do you know how likely a known murderer is to commit any offense, much less another murder? Researchers spend a lot of effort into trying to figure that out, here's a quote[0] from one such paper:
> Our study indicates that it is a misconception that homicide offenders released after long-term incarceration are hardly ever involved in violent crimes upon release. This misconception stems from several studies that have found that homicide offenders rarely re-offend with a second homicide. After analyzing a large volume of data, our study found that none of the 336 released homicide offenders committed another homicide, but approximately one-third of both the felony homicide offenders and general altercation precipitated homicide offenders do re-offend with new violent or drug offenses.
> Additionally, homicide is not a homogeneous behavior. Homicide perpetrators are not the same in terms of motivation, environmental factors, demographics, and interpersonal dynamics. Different factors of complex combinations precipitate homicides that range from felony murders in the midst of an armed robbery to murders involving sex, love, and emotion, and murders for money and property to murders because of drug use and alcohol consumption
[0] - http://www.newjersey.gov/corrections/pdf/REU/Recidivism_Amon...
I don't profess to know the answer of the underlying question - how you should "deal" with criminals. But reading that study, none of the factors that lead to recidivism are treated in prison(alcohol, drug addiction), some are actually exacerbated(poor economical situation, low education).
Putting drug offenses in there kind of makes those numbers pointless.
We have two options. We insulate the person indefinitely or we condition the person for possible return into the society.
My understanding is that we should only accept solitary confinement where the prisoner does not have any contact with other prisoners but has a constant concealing by professionals and does have other conditions to maintain its decency.
What can (non-american) outsiders do to help fix/improve this situation (in American prisons)?
There are organizations that try to keep people out of prison by giving them activities or trade training.
And there are organizations that try to help people find jobs after leaving prison.
You could find some you like and help them financially.
Another positive influence is the religious community, so you can help those as well. People with strong religious ties tend to have a much easier time joining their community after prison.
There are also some religious communities that try to reach people in prison, and you could help them.
My understanding is that the last one can not happen in open prisons but only in solitary confinement where a single prisoner does not have any contact with other prisoners but still has constant concealing by professionals and does have other conditions to maintain its decency.
We get a whole bunch of violent / profession criminals together so they can learn from each other and build their networks. Then brand them as criminals so they can't get a job when they come out, thus ensuring they reoffend. Oh and we incarcerate for non violent crimes, so entry level criminals have the opportunity to learn from the best and progress their career.
According to the CDC, "On any given day, about one in 25 hospital patients has at least one healthcare-associated infection. "
Allowing prisoners to interact face to face in open and closed environments is going to introduce these extra complexities of prisoners "poisoning" other prisoners.
We've certainly had prisons before 1829 elsewhere in the world.
By having it promote positive improvement and rehabilitation rather than purely punishment.
Here is what a humane prison looks like:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35813470 http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1989083,00... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halden_Prison
By treating prisoners humanely, a society is showing how it treats those who are at the bottom rungs of it. It is a reflection on the society itself.
And yet, they don't make the jump to the idea that maybe people shouldn't be living in worse conditions.
So to handle twice the population, we could either free up ~2,000 square metres, or re-develop the entire road two have twice the density, leading to the loss of most of the single dwelling houses and private gardens.
It's not so much that low density is bad, as that not having high density takes choice away once there's no more space and you have to start increasing density anyway, often in all kinds of suboptimal ways.
The main reason I'm anti high density areas is it's unhealthy: people are stressed, there's no sense of community, commerce space is scarce and extremely expensive to rent so { banks, supermarkets, estate agents } take all of them making any new commercial idea almost impossible to put through thus less employment too. I don't know much about this though, it's just my thoughts after living in very different areas and cities and how I feel about it.
You ever asked us?
>there's no sense of community
Says who? Ronald Reagan?
>commerce space is scarce and extremely expensive to rent so { banks, supermarkets, estate agents } take all of them making any new commercial idea almost impossible to put through thus less employment too
I guess I'll go tell all the shops and such in Davis Square that they don't exist.
Because a lot of people want to keep relatively untouched nature too.
> people are stressed
I don't see any evidence that this is caused by high density living.
> there's no sense of community
Most suburban areas, in my experience, have little sense of community. Maybe small villages are different, but in the suburban areas I've lived, at most I knew my immediate neighbours. People often tend to drive too and from the places where they are involved in community activities. If anything, I feel more connected to communities that form separate from the residential areas, and there tend to be more of them in high density city centres.
> commerce space is scarce
Is it? Near me, the densest areas have plenty of available commercial units cheaply available.
More importantly: Building densely allow for far more flexibility with the rest of the space.
It's a long chain of logic, but fractional reserve banking, at the levels we're seeing, prevents it.
Most of our money supply is created through debt. As a result, housing is bought through debt rather than owned. The competition for better homes drives prices astronomical. The only way to actually get affordable housing is to either move people where there is no competition (e.g. desert of Arizona), or to reduce reserve limits.
Fractional reserve banking generates trillions for big banks, and the electorate doesn't get it. It's not going away.
What can be addressed is the concept of affordable housing. Housing, to a certain degree follows a pretty tight supply and demand curve; put simply if you want affordable housing, pressure your local government to green light permits to build affordable housing[2].
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_theory_of_money [2]http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-cities-see-apartment-rents-f...
We as society wants that certain people do not live among us. But that does not imply they have to live in worst condition. So the solution, instead of prision have contained societies. Both private and public run. So then going to prision would mean relocating to one of the contained societies [1], completely upto the the "offender". In these societies they will have their own system of governence.
[1] They would also would be allowed to move to another country.
If those countries are having them, that is. In medieval times banishment for the most part was equivalent to death (or turning to a life of crime as a bandit).
While a nice idea in theory, how would a contained society actually work? Prisons already are miniature societies (just generally not very humanely run ones). It'd still be a prison, albeit a larger one, wouldn't it? Worst case it'd be something like Manhattan in Escape from New York.
I'm not saying it couldn't work but it's not an easy thing to get right.
If a society is understanding enough to have CS, it safe to expect they would also not use CS for non-violent crimes.
So now what would CS for violent criminals with no skill look like ? Ok so this would be a prision/rehabilitation-center in traditional sense but with a twist that they can also leave provided the country have them.
What you describe - some of the prisons of the "old days" also produced ex-offenders that were seriously mentally ill. That is very easily the effect of having solitary of that sort for so many years. Even if you do wind up being able to mentally withstand the place, you get released with no knowledge of what has happened - which happens now, actually.
It seems that there are many unreported rapes in American prisons. When you read the real stories and how wardens don't care or enable such system, your faith in human nature is over. You realize how fucked up bureocrats are. If Americans – liberals and conservatives – truly cared about human rights they would have started a riot about such issues years ago. They set up a mass whining for the new president of US in less than 24 hours, people clearly don't care about the inhuman treatment of prisoners. Read the testimony of activist Stephen Donaldson. http://articles.latimes.com/1994-05-20/news/ls-60064_1_priso...
Be careful what you wish for.
In any case, prison abolition is a wide topic with a lot of point of views and I could not do any of them justice in an Internet comment. I hate referring someone to wikipedia, but all the other sources I'd cite have a distinctly leftist approach and I think wikipedia is probably the most approachable entrypoint for someone who does not already ascribe to certain ideological premises: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternatives_to_incarceration
>>They are then immediately put in a situation to fuck or fight.
IMHO this aspect of prison life is common knowledge. I wonder how incredibly stupid one has to be to risk getting jailed. And looking at the numbers that is not a marginal phenomenon.
Even if you do grasp the risk at hand, other pressures can drive you to make stupid choices.
Regardless of how you got there, though, it should not be a given that you're going to come out of it worse than you went in.
I still do not get how someone can not understand the consequences. Have they never seen any movie? Really? Never talk to former inmates?
A hint: lot of the "incredibly stupid" things are being done in the heat of the moment. Other times, people don't really imagine something bad could happen to them. Then, sometimes people think they have no other choice - maybe they're "in too deep", or maybe it's the only way they can think of supporting their family, etc. Sometimes people just take a huge risk for potential huge gains (think of it as criminal world equivalent of starting a startup).
Humans are not perfect reasoning machines with infinite computation speed.
That's really it. Rehabilitation and retribution are only minor factors, for the liberal and conservative voters respectively. The main factor is just stopping crime by warehousing people until they die or get too old to cause trouble.
It's expensive, but you have to admit that it is extremely effective.
I've done time in the federal system, and on one of my transfers between prisons, I got to sit beside a supermax transfer prisoner. Really, he was a pretty nice fellow. Said he had to kill a guard once in a while to get out and see the sights and have some decent food. He was on his way to court for that murder case trial.
The explanation that some people just ignore the laws and think they can get away with it is too simple, isn't it?
>> Humans are not perfect reasoning machines
Neider are they "stupid saints". They sometimes just take a huge risk for whatever reason. And sometimes this risk involves getting jailed, because society consider some kind of risks as undesired and make you pay a high price for taking them.
It's similar to (but not the same, I think, as) the difference between not doing X because you've been told Y will happen, and not doing X because you have memories of doing X and Y happening - the latter is a lot more deeply ingrained.
Consider newly-minted adults in prosperous environments leaving their parents' home for college for the first time - they have a theoretical knowledge of the various stresses, risks, and concerns that will arise when they live on their own, but until they've actually done it for a while and had various mishaps, it won't be nearly as well-calibrated and digested into their thinking.
Or consider the uptick of music piracy when the internet was just becoming ubiquitous - people knew, abstractly, that it was theft, and could carry consequences, but that didn't enter into most of their considerations.
Digital piracy is not theft. It's like taking pictures in a museum when it's not allowed. It's taking a picture of public buildings in the wrong country. It's copyright infringement and an issue for the civil court, not the criminal court.
Edit: your other points are good though :)
I do not have to have memories about being raped in the jail to know that it is a bad experience. Am I a genius?
Funny fact: I moved out with 14 to a big city for a special school and lived in a dormitory with normal guys. None of us got jailed.
I hear only bad excuses.
I wouldn't be shocked if the rate for the none capital convictions was in the neighborhood of 10%...well actually I am shocked about it. There's probably also discrimination and some demographics get a lot more false convictions than others (I'd guess being poor doesn't help for example).
[1]: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/20/7230
[2]: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40042842?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...
If, say, a decent portion of your classmates, including people you were friends with, were regularly accused of crimes and occasionally imprisoned for them, what effect do you think it might have on your perception of how "wrong" the acts they committed were?
When cognitive dissonance arises from trying to reconcile actions that are on the opposite end of the spectrum from how you associate a person, the outcome is generally not that one of those two absolutes remains and the other shifts, but that both perceptions shift.
I'm not claiming that any of this justifies poor decisions, only that it's quite feasible to have a heavily warped view ingrained in you, and that, if a split-second comes where a mildly poor decision could get exponentially worse, it's not generally the case that you spend minutes consciously considering all the options and rehearsing them - you make a decision without consciously reviewing why, and a skewed view can make a hell of a difference then.
>>if a split-second comes where a mildly poor decision could get exponentially worse
I think you talk abot non existent things. Can you please explain me how can an average illegal act be a "split-second poor decision"? You can not steal a car or start dealng drugs in a split-second. Except you are Flash.
>>They are then immediately put in a situation to fuck or fight.
IMHO this aspect of prison life is common knowledge. I wonder how incredibly stupid one has to be to risk getting jailed. And looking at the numbers that is not a marginal phenomenon.
I read this as
- it is common knowledge that prison includes fighting and rape
- if you know this (and you should), you accept this as part of your punishment for doing something that sends you to prison
You support this interpretation later on:
you: I still do not get how someone can not understand the consequences.
lolc: Many people who understand the consequences end up in jail. Are you saying they deserve the inhuman treatment because they knew about it?
To me, that's pretty close to how lolc is rephrasing your position, and asking if that's indeed what you mean. And they're not stating that is your position, which would be putting words in your mouth. They're asking you to clarify whether or not that's a fair restatement.
I see two assumptions made in the restatement:
- "fuck or fight" is inhuman[e] treatment. I'd say it is. Do you?
- "knowing the consequences, you act" => "you deserve the consequences" This seems like an acceptable assumption as well. What do you think?
Do you think this is a reasonable interpretation of what you said? That's how I read it, and squares with how I read lolc as interpreting what you said as well, while asking to confirm if that's what you mean. That's not putting words in your mouth.
This may not be what you mean. You're being asked to clarify. If it's not, I'd expect you explain where the interpretation is wrong, not just imply that it is ("Am I?") and leave it up to them to try again. And please clarify if I've mischaracterized what you've said as well.
Given that you find it useful to compare this conversation to a gunfight, it's likely wrong for me to expect you to be civil about it. I'm responding to clarify how I read the situation, and will leave it at that.
[Minor edits for clarity.]
>> "you deserve the consequences" [...] Do you think this is a reasonable interpretation of what you said? That's how I read it, and squares with how I read lolc as interpreting what you said as well
I did not said that anyone deserves an inhumant treatment like this. If you rephrase what I said and doing so it gets "pretty close to" or "reasonable interpreted as" something really stupid, that is not my fault. Both of us are better off if you just stop rephrasing my sentences, don't you think?
Hello manslaughter.
It's very easy to do something stupid without realizing it in the moment.
Generally we treat killing others, even if you didn't mean to, very harshly. It's very easy to get incarcerated for a crash caused while driving tipsy, for instance, especially if somebody dies.
I imagine manslaughter is one of those things where you only have to fuck up once, completely by accident, to ruin your life (and a few others' obviously) quite terribly.
Please tell me the situation you described putted 2 M people into jail! You must have the highest "accidental death" rate of the universe.
Friends often shove and shoulder-punch each other without it being self-defence. It's usually not even considered "hitting". But accidents do happen. Especially when substances affect people's sense of balance and floors are uneven.
Here's a much more common way to go to prison for something silly: You have a baggie of weed in your car. You roll through a stop sign. Get pulled over. Cop smells the weed. You go to jail. Oh, you just bought plenty so you can share with friends (they all pitched in). Bam, charged with intent to sell. Serious jail time.
It's really easy to go to prison for stupid stuff.[1]
In fact, on average everyone commits 3 felonies per day. --> http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527487044715045744389...
[1] Hell, as a teenager I got arrested for shoplifting something like 20 euro worth of candy. No jail, but talk about stupid reasons to get arrested.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/11/perceived_ris...
Knowing of consequences does not imply being aware of them.
We should start by getting rid of private, for profit prisons. Next we should actually make them safe places. I originally thought the headline was a joke because prisoners (gangs to be precise) already run prisons.
because literally everyone was raised in the same privileged home you were ? Nobody was abused or neglected and not taught right from wrong ? everyone is literally just like you ?
I am fundamentally opposed to prison in all but the most extreme cases. I also happen to believe a bunch of other things that would also see me branded as a radical by society, but I digress. Prison is fundamentally destructive as an institution. It is slavery by another name and it must be dismantled, though I don't know how we begin the process.
Its political, and at least in the US, it traces its roots back to corruption and how unrepresentative the US government is of its citizens.
If you want to fix almost all societal problems, you first need a system of government that fears and respects its people. I don't care which permutation of state you pick, but if you want a government to care what you say, it has to care about its people.
Most countries have that problem. Its less overbearing because most European states have better implementations of near the same parliamentary system, but even those governments are often too centralized and too easily corrupted, and that breeds an unrepresentative state.
Making a government that acts in the will of its people is absolutely step one to fixing the problems it causes. Then you just need to persuade the people and thus the representatives to change it.
So under that sweeping generalization, you consider rape and murder equivalent to, say, coming out as homosexual??
Reform is necessary, but you can't just boil everything down into apologetics of "institutional discrimination against the morally-impaired."
For those interested in keeping up with our contributing to the effort to fix the US prison system, please check out the Ella Baker center, http://ellabakercenter.org. Started by Van Jones twenty years ago, they've been on the forefront of resisting unnecessary prison expansions, reducing the rate at which juveniles are put in prison, and more.
The problem is we the people. We treat anyone in prison or with a government label of felon, sex offender etc. as less than human being. I can't blame the prison university.
$168,000
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/nyregion/citys-annual-c...
Average in the US:
$31,000
https://www.vera.org/publications/the-price-of-prisons-what-...
This isn't about justice. It's about prison guard jobs. It's about welfare.
http://www.demos.org/publication/census-count-and-prisoners-...
California has likewise passed a law to discontinue the process there by 2020.
For much of the rest of the country, this is still a problem.
> Immediately they are yelled at by officers to strip naked, get ‘nuts to butts,’ and after being searched they are kept naked for several minutes until they are issued some boxers...
is true. Boah, how can everybody yell at the 'bad behaviour' of Trump and Clinton and look away here?
In addition if you're a politician you're not going to win votes by campaigning for better conditions in prisons, now matter how you spin it.
While they might not admit it, some people want to know that these criminals are being mistreated. They like the idea, somewhere deep down, of a criminal being forced to wear pink underwear and being fed spoiled food. It's twisted, wrong even. But it's very much American. Like apple pie, or baseball.
And there are people who have been in jail, awaiting trial for years, I think infamously there's one case in Riker's Island that waited 12 years to go to trial. Jails are every thing that is bad about prison made worse by constant flux, no one has to accept that these are the people they will have to spend years with.
Yeah but the tide has turned against him, he got booted out of office (http://www.rawstory.com/2016/11/sheriff-joe-arpaio-booted-fr...).
About the only positive result from this years' election.
It's still a long way from an evidence based drug (law enforcement) policy, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.
In my own experience, police in Oregon and Colorado have started enforcing DUI and public consumption for marijuana rather than possession - and those charges carry higher punishmebts than minor possession used to carry. My neighbor was raided by a swat team last year, fully armed, with emergency support, for alllegedly being over plant count (a municipal court type violation...).
So, things are moving sideways. The people addicted to making perverse profits are predictably not keen to let go.
It is a known, accepted meaningful contrast to rehabilitative justice (make the person stop being a criminal) and restorative justice (try to undo the harm that the crime caused). It isn't just a flawed overlooked system, it's a philosophical underpinning.
Why do many US Americans think this way (I'm German, so also by looking at Germany's history I think completely differently about all this).
This is reflected in our means-testing for entitlements, for instance: if you can't find a job within a few months, you must be intrinsically lazy, and therefore don't deserve anymore handouts. So we cut off unemployment and food aid after a relatively short amount of time.
Following the civil war prisons were used as a back door replacement for slavery. There's a strong strain in America that My Money is worth more than Your Life which makes it intractable to spend enough to do prison "right". A general belief in a just world...
One day you wake up and realize what all this has lead to and because now the problem is so big you can only see two options: utter despair or figure out a way to pretend to yourself that this is what you want.
It's certainly not specific to americans! I don't know about german jails, but in France they are notoriously bad and many people are totally fine with it.
I cannot believe it. I would fire immediately all and every prison employee which act as respectlessly and irresponsibly (action --> reaction).
There was now a 8 year long Democratic administration and I have to read such stories. Is this also the majority-Democratic-sentiment? Or were they helpless against the Republican dominated congress?
Just looked up statistics (wikipedia): 1 in 3 black males will go to prison in their lifetime (and then be treated in this way). I think of my friends: 1 in 3! Absurd (even worse than I thought), someone has to fix this!!
One day I was doing some grocery shopping and a some guy comes up and asks me how my relationship with Jesus was. I'm an atheist and said so and he began following me around the store trying out various talking points in an attempt to get me to attend the youth outreach concert/thing they were having that night.
At one point he asks "What if some one were to rape your daughter and then shoot himself, you wouldn't care that he wouldn't be punished?"
Think about that for a second. This was a youth pastor, a man who theoretically instructs the children of the United State on ethics and morality, who did not believe death was a sufficient punishment.
ETA: and lest anyone think I might be exaggerating his stance, I actually called him on that several times. "Well I mean: he's dead, how is that not punishment" I asked immediately. I think 4 times we pushed at the sides of that point before he moved onto some other argument. Which is to say he was willing to defend the idea that death wasn't punishment enough.
This is the root cause, and the political/policy effects are a symptom. There are places where this kind of treatment would be considered a scandal, but American culture doesn't agree.
Why is it that all the successful companies in the private prison industry are terrible for the inmates? The client is the state, and the state doesn't care about costs associated with caring for inmates, right?
Is there any way to turn that on its head? To... uh, "disrupt" some small part of this?
Today I asked this entrepreneur for his perspective on what needs to change in our judicial system. Not surprisingly, he gave me a long list of things that are broken, including the corrupting influence of money which incentivizes tough laws and full prisons. And the money which allows people with money to walk away with a slap on the wrist for committing the exact same crime that put him away for years.
When he was released, he was scared to leave prison. He shared how the free world is terrifying to those who've been incarcerated for years. He'd been locked up in high school and never had a chance to get a proper education. He couldn't find anyone to hire him. He couldn't find anyone who'd even rent him an apartment with a felony on his record. The only people who reached out to him were his old gang members. Imagine spending the majority of your life behind bars and then being thrown into a world with smart phones and the internet -- neither of which existed when you were locked up.
Many of us in this community agree on how unfair the judicial system is in America. Many of us believe in the concept of second chances and redemption. And many of us (myself included) could do a better job at demonstrating that belief with our actions.
There are many states that allow private prisons. There have been multiple articles about how awful these prisons are. Why not try to open a non-profit prison where gov't funds are supplemented with donations and focusing on rehabilitation and humane living conditions. Then we both improve the lives of some inmates, and can more effectively compare outcomes.
Edit: not to mention the $890K they spent on lobbying.
[1]: http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/IROL/11/117983/201...
The basic problem is still the tiny amount spent per prisoner on anything other than keeping them locked up. We need to spend more if we want them to not just be heading straight back to jail.
* Prisoners would be treated better
* Whatever small profits could be pumped into rehabilitation
Currently for-profit prisons have perverse incentives, like claiming prisoners have behaved badly and therefore extending their sentences.
We need to change what we pay for - no more paying for each prisoner locked up, lets pay for each prisoner that avoids reoffending. We want people that come out of prison to not go around committing more crimes. For profit might help here in that they may try innovative approaches that achieve this aim - we just have to give them the right incentives.
Having said this I actually think a for profit model with the right incentives might be the best way to go. The current incentive structure for private prisons basically encourages a revolving door since they are paid per prisoner per day.
What we need is smarter incentives that encourage prisons to help ex-prisioners to not reoffend. The problem is not the small share of spend going towards private profits, by a system that encourages the prisons to always be full.
> If somebody has a drug problem we treat their addiction, if they are aggressive we provide anger management, if they have got money problems we give them debt counselling. So we try to remove whatever it was that caused the crime. The inmate himself or herself must be willing to change but our method has been very effective. Over the last 10 years, our work has improved more and more.
> Fewer than 10% then return to prison after their release. In England and Wales, and in the United States, roughly half of those serving short sentences reoffend within two years, and the figure is often higher for young adults.
Does anyone want to say things in support of prison? If we revamp the prison system, what things should we keep? What do prisons do right?
And, what are the next steps for a community willing to invest in changes to our criminal management? How do we make a difference?
You should have to stay there for as long as you are a threat to society or as long as your situation has not changed and it is likely that you will commit the crime again.
So everything that is already that should be kept, everything else we can get rid of. I would personally say, start with socializing them again, then we have an incentive to reduce prison populations by keeping people out, who do not belong there in the first place. As always, when I make this comments I am a hopeless optimist: Do not worry, it is already happening.
Also something to cheer you up, America: Where do you think ISIS comes from? If you look for a group of losers, just turn to your local (on HN often praised) European prison.
I have often thought the solution to the reoffending problem is to fill the prisioners day with heaps of novel activities so that each day is spent learning new things (doesn't really matter what as long as it is not criminal). The aim would be that by the time the prisioner has finished their sentence their old life and self will be forgotten. The human brain only has so much capacity and if you fill it with enough novelty you will overwrite all the old bad information and behaviours.
VR has the ability to make this cheap and effective.
I object. They're still human, and as they have been deprived of their freedom, we (society) have been entrusted with caring for them. Even the death penalty (quite flawed as it is) may be better in some sense, morally, than "the nastiest hellholes".
I was punished. Spanking when I was younger, grounding when I was older. Without these consequences, I would be a worse adult.
We may disagree about degree, but "stupid beyond imagination" is an overstatement.
>The aim would be that by the time the prisioner has finished their sentence their old life and self will be forgotten.
I know you're talking about the nice prison here, but if you hold that belief then what happens to the innocent person who has had 50 years of hell?
Your argument is a very good one why no prison should ever be a hellhole because there are no prisoners that certain to be in the never-to-be-released category.
I don't think those really have to do directly with prisons though. It's a related topic.
The problem is that there are always more important things to worry about in our society than reforming prisons. Not much has changed since prisons have been invented, really. Recidivism is unacceptably high. The solution is not more discipline. It's more respect, more compassion, more dignity, more learning, and more showing that life doing other things is as rewarding if not more than doing the things that lead to prison.
Reform could only be somewhere where >90% people are non-criminal e.g. army, monastery
like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
But the fact that prisoners frequently have to face rape is sick and shows how dysfunctional the current system is. I even read some time ago an article that stated that the US is the only country in the world where more men than women are raped. (due to the fact that so many men are raped in prison)
What I personally believe would be a good way to treat this issue is to have prisoners work in the private sector while their payment will largely be used to pay for prison and to repay their victims for the damage they have caused them. The prisoner is set free once he has paid for all damages. (or as much as is reasonably possible)
Prisons will have an incentive to make sure that their prisoners earn as much as possible (trainings and education), victims will receive payments for damages and the prisoners themselves will have an incentive to get out of prison as soon as possible. Of course this can't be done with every type of felony and there's the question if damages are always accurate.
Also with this approach some types of felonies cannot be punished. One example would be drug abuse. You are only harming yourself and since no third party can claim damages it also would not be punished. (this alone would hugely reduce prison population)
You could even make the case that selling drugs would be legalised since there's clearly a buyer willing to buy and consume it who's not hurting any third parties directly by his choice.
I believe it is more reasonable to have prison sentences reflect the damage caused instead of ideology and prison life be more about making it up to the victims (as far as it is possible) instead of creating the most nasty, brutal place imaginable and having people suffer there.
It's probably also a better lesson for an offender to have to repay someone for destroying his car than subjecting him to repeated rapes which will likely break him psychologically.
Well yeah, no shit. Of course they want it better in there. If they got all this, they'd eventually be complaining that they should have computers and playstations.
Prison isn't supposed to be torture (physically or mentally) but it's also not supposed to be better than poor people have it. If poor people can't be taken care of to the point they have these things (and I think they should!) then I don't think starting with the prisons is the right way to go.
If you really care about this, then you should advocate that poor people don't produce children anymore so that at least "born poor", that is a common cause of poverty, is mostly eliminated.
That's a false conclusion. You could heavily tax the rich to ensure everyone [who had a child] had sufficient to live on and so no one would be "poor" (you'd have poorer, but not poor per se). There are probably further additional possible ways that the problem could be solved and hence further possible outcomes that the parent could advocate and maintain consistent logic.
RoW actually shows that this basic approach does not work at all.